As an adherent of a fringe ideology (libertarians are a minority, paleolibertarians a sect among them and none others I know if is a Stirnerite to boot) I can be out of place in mainstream company. I often hang out on the fringes, both because we can share our disgust for the “Establishment” for our own pet reasons and I find them more interesting. Among those places recently was the Inverted World where I was sympatico with regard to Darwinism but not racialism or the Iraq war. There were some commenters who agreed with me on the last issue and Lawrence Auster dissented on the first, but I think I was the only one in the threads I commented in (except this one, I assume) who disagreed on the second. Being one of the Paultards or MoRons as we may be called, I took interest in the posts on Ron Paul (and why the site-owner cannot support him). Among the things objected to is granting Muslims (and non-Westerners more generally) the same moral status as Westerners so that civilian casualties on their part are not to be dismissed. A lot of other commenters attacked Islam and Muslims more generally. The last commenter (posting as “AK”) stood out more than I ever have at any blogs I recall in that he was a South Asian Muslim. Enthusiastic Paul supporters and people born abroad are not known for their elegant use of the English language on the internet and this person was not an exception although there wasn’t anything difficult to understand. He took racism and religious bigotry against him others like him in stride as a natural tendency of humanity whose expression should not be repressed and even accepted “blood guilt” for violence perpetrated by his ancestors in India (which is more than an individualist like myself would ever do). He expressed hope that all the different citizens of America can recognize common interests they have in better policies than politicians are giving us now (if only there was a political ideology based on that). I often interact with people who are difficult to converse with and while I do try (and had a number of links demonstrating as such in the comments to a GNXP post) to be polite enough to alleviate hostility and continue the conversation I am not always succesful, as was unknowingly the case recently (though whether I share that story with you remains to be seen). My hat is off to Mr. Abdul Kalam for his exemplary conduct in a hostile environment.

In somewhat related matters a new blog that has popped up and put me on its blogroll is the Odessa Syndicate which advocates a “Far Right/Far Left Synthesis” but not the good Keith Preston/Bill Kaufman kind. I explain some of my problems with nationalism and racialism there (I also recently discussed the lack of contradiction but tension between racism/communitarianism and libertarianism here at No Treason), but didn’t feel like stumping for laissez faire and against authoritarianism. Robert Lindsay also announces that he is a “grocery shop socialist” rather than a Stalinist particularly, but I still think the latter term imparts more information and so I will continue referring to him as such. A very different blog that has added me to its blogroll is the apparently lefty site bLCkdgRd which states that it does not expect a blogroll back, and so I will give it none.

Elsewhere I introduced Rafe Champion of The Rathouse (and formerly some other classical liberal/libertarian blogs such as Catallaxy I believe) to the political science of Mencius Moldbug, and more particularly his critique of limited government democracy. I was delinquent in responding to Mr. Champion’s latest post so he might have wandered off, but hopefully he’ll google himself and find this. His site has a condensed (fortunately, as the original is almost 800 pages with more than 200 of them footnotes) summary of Karl Popper’s “The Open Society and its Enemies” which I may get around to reading someday (and on the subject of books, Vox Day’s “The Irrational Atheist” has its first full review from an atheist).

Finally, in the comments to Will Wilkinson’s excellent mocking of “national greatness conservatism” site I noted the base urges I and much of humanity more broadly share with the ideology and the unbridgeable chasm between us.